Saddam Hussein, as Kuwaitis to their horror learned overnight, is not a man to be trifled with. Lionised at home, the 53-year-old President has long been viewed with more than suspicion abroad. Torture is said to be routine in his overflowing prisons, he has little compunction about unleashing chemical weapons against his rebellious Kurds, and he is reliably reported to have drawn his pistol and shot dead a minister who dared openly to question his strategy.

Until this week, Saddam has largely got away with such brutality thanks to his gagged opposition at home and grateful friends abroad. Whatever Arab leaders may have said privately, in public they recognised the role Iraq had played in keeping revolutionary Iran at bay, and may have felt there was little that Cairo or Amman could do to slow Saddam's obsession with turning Baghdad into a regional superpower.

The West, for long happy to indulge Iraq in return for lucrative economic contracts, also mostly chose to look the other way, until the execution earlier this year of an Observer journalist on apparently trumped-up charges of spying.

The invasion of Kuwait may force Saddam's one-time friends to face up to a monster that is partly of their own making. World leaders who have long seen Saddam as a survivor and master of political manoeuvre must now reckon with a man who shows no sign of backing off his threat to turn Kuwait into a graveyard.

Born in 1937 into a peasant family in Takrit, north of Baghdad, Saddam's climb to absolute power has been punctuated by violence ever since he joined a secret Ba'ath Party cell in the early 1950s. In 1959, he took part in a botched attempt on the life of General Abdel Karim Qassem, who had one year earlier seized power from the British-dominated Hashemite throne. The Ba'ath Party consolidated its power with a second coup in 1968, accompanied by a bloody purge. Worse followed in 1979, when Saddam was finally inaugurated as President.

His accession heralded a carnage described as one of the worst in Middle Eastern history. His victims have included politicians, military officers, communists, and dissident Shi'a clergymen. In March 1988, Saddam's military unleashed a barrage of chemical weapons on the Kurdish town of Halabja killing an estimated 5,000. Despite ritual protests abroad, similar attacks were launched several months later, forcing thousands of Kurds to flee to Iran and Turkey.

Superficially, Saddam emerged all-powerful from the Gulf war. True, in eight years of battling, claiming a million lives, he had failed to topple his intransigent rival, Ayatollah Khomeini; but Iraqis celebrated their prowess in keeping Iranian fundamentalism at bay and Saddam began to cast himself in the role of Arab leader.

At home, however, his problems were multiplying. A top priority was staving off Iraq's foreign creditors, including Britain, to whom the debt was put at Pounds 30-40 billion. The 50 per cent owed to Arab friends, chiefly Kuwait and the Saudis, was widely understood to have been written-off.

Almost as troubling were rising economic expectations, particularly among the middle classes; the many thousands of prisoners of war who remained in Iran; and Tehran's adamant refusal to bow to Baghdad's bullying and sign a peace treaty giving Iraq full, rather than shared, sovereignty of the Shatt al-Arab waterway.

Today, Saddam runs Iraq as an efficient police state. Few Iraqis dare voice their unhappiness, and the President's attempts to answer demands for greater democracy with a new constitution have been written off as largely cosmetic.